Movie review: “7 Seconds”

Don’t bother watching this, unless you like gratuitous violence and some seriously bad acting. Definitely not a feel-good Easter Sunday kind of movie.

The bare bones of the plot are as follows: 7 Seconds is a 2005 action film that was directed by Simon Fellows and shot in Romania. The two main actors are Wesley Snipes, who plays Jack Tulliver, an ex-soldier-turned-professional-thief, and pretty Tamzin Outhwaite, who plays a NATO military cop, Sgt Kelly Anders. It starts with a very complicated armoured heist, planned down to the last detail by Tulliver and involving decoys, car chases, and a beautiful young double-crossing woman.

The heist goes wrong when a rival group of thieves viciously mows down Tulliver’s entire group with machine guns (in sharp contrast to the military precision of Tulliver’s group who don’t kill but merely temporarily incapacitate their adversaries). They capture the young woman (Susan), and chase Tulliver all around the city, when they realise that he has left behind the bags of money, but run off with a mysterious metallic case. Trying to escape them, he carjacks Kelly Anders, a blonde bombshell with brains, brawn and bravery, with whom he engages in a bit of strictly verbal sexual sparring. But you just know they’re going to have to do the deed at some stage….

The two of them become reluctant partners in the quest to save Susan from a wild-eyed Romanian madman (note, since the end of the Cold War, it is no longer politically correct to use Russians in these roles), who seems to suffer from an incurable disease that makes him shake all over and incapable of aiming a gun and shooting straight (I guess that gives you a pretty good chance of escaping?). I have no idea why his knuckle-cracking goons haven’t deposed him yet, but perhaps they can’t think that far ahead.

The rest of the movie involves a few gruesome scenes of torture (Richard mumbling soothingly in my ear “It’s just a movie, it’s just a movie…”), some pretty nifty hand to hand combat, and an obligatory shoot-out with rattling machine guns – frightfully inelegant.

It turns out that the case contains what is supposedly a Van Gogh painting, “Lilies in the Field”, which was in the process of being validated. Ironically, although it is revealed in the movie that the painting is not a fake, I have not been able to locate it anywhere on the web (catalogue of Van Gogh’s paintings) . So I am left wondering whether they made it up…

“The title refers to the timers at the beginning of the film, which are set at 00:07 (7 seconds).” (Wikipedia). Other than this rather obscure reference to a detail that is actually quite irrelevant to the plot, I don’t see any deeper significance to the name of the movie.

I figure there was a good reason why this was released directly to DVD, rather than to the big screen first.

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